Pianoforte gains real-time insights with Oracle Cloud
The retail fashion group deployed Oracle Analytics Cloud on Oracle Autonomous Database to improve operational decision-making and boost agility.
“With Oracle Analytics Cloud powered by Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, all our corporate departments now have rapid access to data, and operational decisions at all levels are data-based. This has greatly enhanced internal efficiency and business agility, which is exactly what we need in the fast-paced fashion industry.”
Business challenges
Pianoforte Group was born from the merger of Inticom, creator of the Yamamay underwear fashion brand, and Kuvera, owner of the Carpisa leather goods brand, and is jointly led by its two Italian founders, the Cimmino and Carlino families. Pianoforte Group has more than 2,300 employees and a growing network of 1,300-plus shops in 12 countries.
At the operations level, Pianoforte wanted to improve both in-store and centralized decision-making. For that, the company needed to have accurate data in real time, along with the ability to analyze sales trends, stock management, and the performance of marketing promotions. However, with its legacy on-premises data warehouse, and a business intelligence solution that was no longer suitable for that purpose, the company experienced frequent problems with slow, inconsistent, and inaccurate data. Pianoforte also needed its data warehouse to function 24/7, because its shops are open outside of office hours and its supply chain spans multiple time zones.
On a more strategic level, Pianoforte teams needed enhanced analytics to accurately assess the viability of each franchised store, taking into account profitability, margins, and shop location, among other factors.
Because Pianoforte’s analyzed data comes from a variety of databases and sources, including ERP and in-store POS systems, the company’s IT department previously needed to spend substantial time and effort performing data extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. The considerable administration and maintenance of its data warehouse also meant that IT staff could not dedicate time and resources to strategic tasks that support the company’s growth.
Why Pianoforte Chose Oracle
For its analytics solution, Pianoforte selected Oracle Analytics Cloud over Qlikview and Microsoft PowerBI because of Oracle Analytics’s powerful features, including data preparation, visualization, natural language processing, natural language generation, and intelligent data enrichment. These capabilities met the company’s business needs in the fast-changing fashion industry.
The company selected Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, because of its performance attributes and the elimination of IT administrative tasks, plus its ease of use and reliability compared with Microsoft Azure. Furthermore, Oracle was the only cloud provider that guaranteed service level agreements by including them in the contract, di Nuzzi says.
Results
By implementing Oracle Analytics and Autonomous Data Warehouse, all running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Pianoforte is now able to analyze data at all levels and across all business areas 24/7, which is vital for a growing fashion company. Analysts can accurately assess the success of various sales drives and in-store promotions, as well as identify the top-performing sales team members in each store.
By having accurate and real-time sales, stockroom, and supply chain data at their fingertips, store managers can rapidly adjust sales strategies, and always ensure optimum stock levels for a wide range of leather goods and fashion underwear.
From its headquarters and regional offices, Pianoforte’s sales and marketing departments can now study sales across more than 1,300 stores in real time. This enables commercial executives to make rapid, data-based operating decisions—for example, how to best manage marketing promotions for selected items across different countries. Similarly, the customer management department can respond faster and in a more personalized way to customers’ online and telephone queries.
Additionally, Pianoforte’s managers are now able to see the real-time performance of each store, review its profitability, and conduct shop viability analyses. This enables the group to make informed decisions about whether a shop should adjust its prices on certain items or across the entire store. Furthermore, it helps Pianoforte executives to determine the optimum locations for future stores.
Pianoforte was able to ensure rapid platform adoption thanks to Oracle Analytics Cloud’s user-friendly interface, which has simplified analytics across the company and minimized requests for IT assistance.
By running Oracle Analytics Cloud with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Pianoforte is able to rapidly analyze a wide range of data—for example, from point-of-sale and ERP software—which is stored across various Oracle and third-party databases. The company gained more than a 30% speed boost in analytics operations, thanks to Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse’s columnar data format and memory optimization, and it reduced the average time to generate reports from 5 seconds to 2. This substantially improved staff productivity, as Pianoforte uses Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse to process more than 2 million queries per year, and up to 7,000 requests per day and 50 simultaneous users during peak times.
“The most significant improvement is on query performance,” di Nuzzo says. “Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse enables us to quickly perform complex aggregations. This enables staff in all departments to dedicate more time to value-added tasks instead of waiting for the system.”
With Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Pianoforte’s IT team no longer needs to spend large amounts of time on ETL processes, and it has significantly reduced system maintenance, performance monitoring, and data administration time and costs. This has freed IT specialists to work more closely with business units, and to spend much more time on strategically valuable tasks—such as finding machine-learning techniques that create additional insights through clustering and data-driven predictions.
Pianoforte also reduced hardware expenditure, increased systems reliability, and enhanced data security by moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The move also enabled the company to improve operational costs by setting alerts to monitor resource consumption.